Johnson Harold Wilson

Twentieth Century Man: The Prime Ministers Series
1. Auflage 2024
ISBN: 978-1-80075-333-4
Verlag: Swift Press
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark

E-Book, Englisch, 160 Seiten

Reihe: The Prime Ministers

'The finest prose stylist in the House of Commons since Roy Jenkins' Mark Lawson WINNER OF A WESTMINSTER BOOK AWARD ?Harold Wilson was one of the most successful politicians of the twentieth century. Prime Minister from 1964-70, and again from 1974-76, he won four elections as well as a referendum on UK membership of the European Community. The achievements of the Wilson Era - from legalising homosexuality to protecting ethnic minorities, from women's rights to the Open University - radically improved ordinary people's lives for the better. In Harold Wilson, former Labour cabinet minister and bestselling author Alan Johnson presents a portrait of a truly twentieth-century man, whose 'white heat' speech proclaimed a scientific and technological revolution - and who was as much a part of the sixties as the Beatles and the Profumo scandal.

Alan Johnson was a Labour MP for 20 years. He served in five cabinet positions in the Governments of Tony Blair and Gordon Brown including Education Secretary, Health Secretary and Home Secretary. He is the author of award-winning childhood memoir This Boy and the sequels Please Mister Postman and The Long and Winding Road, as well as a memoir about music and three highly acclaimed novels. He and his wife Carolyn live in East Yorkshire.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Johnson, Alan

Leseproben

3

In September 1927, 11-year-old Harold Wilson began his secondary education at Royds Hall Grammar School, having passed the County Minor Scholarship (a forerunner of the eleven-plus), as Marjorie had done seven years earlier. Both were beneficiaries of their father’s resolve for his children to enjoy the educational opportunities he’d been denied. Marjorie was to become that rarity of the age, a university-educated woman, studying Chemistry at Leeds. After failing her finals, she switched to teaching, which, together with the Girl Guides, became her vocation.

Harold threw himself into the extracurricular activities available at Royds Hall, particularly drama and sport. What he did not appear to excel at particularly was schoolwork. Early reports referred more often to his indolence than to his erudition. Only one teacher disturbed this consensus, pointing out that young Harold shone at languages, even dabbling at one stage in Esperanto.

In his second year at the school the boys had to produce an essay under the heading ‘Myself in 25 Years’. It’s here that we detect the first evidence of an ambition to hold high political office, although in his contribution Wilson saw himself not as Prime Minister, but as Chancellor of the Exchequer. The essay even contained details of his first Budget, including the introduction of a tax on gramophones, which young Harold considered a frivolity for the idle rich. His focus on the Treasury was understandable given that his local MP, Philip Snowden, had been Chancellor in that first Labour government of 1924 (and was to occupy the post again when the party returned to power in 1929). Snowden was greatly admired by Herbert Wilson, and it was hardly surprising that this influenced his increasingly politically aware son.

Two disruptive events happened in quick succession during Harold Wilson’s grammar school education. The first could have ended his life; the second had a profound influence on the course it was to take.

In 1930 he was part of a Scout troop camping in the Yorkshire countryside. Together with a pal, he visited a local farm offering fresh milk straight from the cow. Harold accidentally knocked over his friend’s glass but drank his own, becoming one of the 12 unfortunates who developed typhoid from the unsterilised milk. Before the discovery of antibiotics, typhoid was a killer. Half of those infected in this outbreak died. Boy Scout Harold narrowly escaped the mortuary, but spent almost four months incarcerated at Meltham Isolation Hospital in a critical condition. A beefy, strapping lad, his weight plummeted to four and a half stone, and he would walk with a stoop for the rest of his life. As visiting times were restricted to half an hour a week, there were few opportunities to learn about what was going on at home. But the main news (about the second disaster to afflict the family) would have been kept from him for his own good.

When he was discharged, it could be kept secret no longer: Herbert Wilson had lost his job. A third of men in the Colne Valley were out of work and Huddersfield, which had been protected from the worst of the recession by the strength of its textile and engineering sectors, had finally fallen to the scourge of the age. At 48, Herbert had to finance the family from his savings, which led to a significant decline in their standard of living. His period of enforced idleness had a defining political influence on his son. Too young to understand fully his father’s despair, Harold always regretted thoughtlessly asking for the three shillings and sixpence (17½p) he needed to buy a sheath knife. His father’s awkward and disconsolate response – ‘I can’t just now, you know how it is’ – was so seared upon his son’s memory that it was recorded word for word in Wilson’s memoirs.

The wonder is that these two significant setbacks did not have a more negative impact on Harold’s education. Without his father’s single-mindedness, he may well have been forced to leave school at 16 and contribute to the family income. The typhoid put him behind academically, but this would have been far more damaging were it not for the extra tuition given by his Maths teacher, who coached Harold in geometry and algebra free of charge after school. The teacher was a member of Huddersfield Labour Party, and so his influence was political as well as pedagogic.

This was a particularly turbulent period in Labour history. Philip Snowden (the Wilsons’ MP) precipitated a crisis when, as Chancellor in MacDonald’s second administration, he insisted upon a cut in unemployment benefit as part of a package of measures to counter the economic slump. The Cabinet refused to endorse Snowden’s plan; the government collapsed, and when Ramsay MacDonald went to Buckingham Palace to tender his resignation, he was instead persuaded by King George V to return to Downing Street as head of a ‘National Government’ supported by the Conservatives and some Liberals. Snowden, as one of the few Labour ministers to join that government, was expelled from the party (along with MacDonald).

Herbert Wilson remained unemployed for 16 months and when he found work it was as chief chemist at Brotherton’s Chemical Works on the Wirral. The Wilson family would need to relocate to Cheshire, and Harold would have to change schools at a critical point in his education. Wirral Grammar was a brand-new school for boys, whereas Royds Hall had been co-educational. Like all new schools it filled gradually as each cohort of 11-year-olds joined and the previous one moved up a year. When Harold arrived as a 16-year-old in 1932 he was the only sixth-form pupil, which meant the disruption of changing schools had the serendipitous effect of providing him with one-to-one tuition. His subjects were History, French and English (with Latin and Maths as subsidiaries). Despite his bout of ill health as a child he was also a keen athlete, excelling at long-distance running.

One sport that he had shown absolutely no interest in was tennis – until his first and hugely consequential visit to Brotherton’s sports complex at Port Sunlight in 1934. Eighteen-year-old Harold had taken a break from revising for his Higher School Certificate (the equivalent of today’s A levels) to watch his father win a bet.

Herbert Wilson had a party trick. Asked to multiply any two five-figure numbers he could do the sum in his head within 15 seconds. Upon hearing this, a disbelieving rival chemist at Lever Brothers placed a five-shilling bet that he could set a multiplication test that Herbert would fail. Herbert accepted the challenge, and Harold went to watch the contest. His father triumphed, but that wasn’t what made the occasion so significant. After it finished, Harold wandered towards the tennis courts, where a shorthand typist by the name of Gladys Mary Baldwin happened to be playing. Eventually, like him, to be known by her second rather than first name, Gladys Mary had an immediate impact on her student spectator. Harold told a journalist many years later that it was love at first sight. Within a few days he had purchased a racket and joined the tennis club. Within three weeks, he’d told Mary of his intention to marry her.

What seems clear is that Mary was not as immediately smitten by Harold as he was by her. Two months older than him, she’d left school at 16 and was a working woman by the time she met schoolboy Harold. They shared the same Nonconformist background and worshipped at the same church, but these were the only things they had in common. Mary’s father was a Congregationalist minister. Originally from Diss in Norfolk, the family had moved in accordance with her father’s postings. At the puritanical end of the Protestant spectrum, Reverend Baldwin barred his daughter from reading novels and insisted that she attend church five times on Sunday. Her eventual escape from this regime was to a boarding school for educating the daughters of Congregational ministers in Crawley, Sussex. Despite her father’s strictures, Mary developed a deep love of literature, particularly the poems of John Keats and Percy Bysshe Shelley and the novels of Jane Austen and Henry James. The one thing that Harold could never commit to his prodigious memory was poetry, and his artistic tastes were confined to the paintings of L. S. Lowry, Agatha Christie thrillers and the comic operas of Gilbert and Sullivan.

Harold may have declared his intention to marry Mary within a few weeks of their meeting but there would be no wedding for six years, a notably long engagement even by the customs of the time. All the evidence suggests that neither of them had any previous amorous relationships. Alone among his many biographers, Austen Morgan suggests that Harold had had one serious girlfriend before he met Mary. Apparently, her name was Doreen Richmond, and on their first date she was taken to see a film about the Congress of Berlin (which perhaps explains why there wasn’t a second one). As for Mary, there is no indication of any previous suitors, but Ben Pimlott’s fine biography of Wilson reproduces a poem she wrote about a schoolgirl’s crush on a French mistress. The poem demonstrates a less puritanical Mary than her father would have wanted and a girl who may have entertained the occasional libidinous thought.

My mouth is dry as she goes by –

One curving line from foot to thigh –

And with unEnglish liberty

Her bosom bounces, full and free;

Pale skin, pink lips, a wide blue stare;

Her page-boy fall of silky hair

Swings on her shoulder like a bell;

O how I love Mamzelle!

Mary Wilson’s poetry was to be a central feature of her future fame as the Prime Minister’s wife, but she could never...